Repairman jack, p.1
Repairman Jack, page 1
Repairman Jack
A Mysterious Profile
F. Paul Wilson
Author’s Note
This profile contains spoilers toward the end. If you’ve read the series, these won’t matter. If you’ve picked this up out of curiosity, by all means read it and familiarize yourself with Jack. I’ll warn you when the spoilers begin.
Repairman Jack
It all started—for the character, at least—with a simple ad in The Village Voice, placed without his knowledge by a friend:
When all else fails …
When nothing else works …
REPAIRMAN JACK
He wouldn’t have chosen that name himself, but it has stuck through twenty-three novels, ten short stories, and a graphic novel.
For the writer who dreamed him up, however, it started, appropriately enough, with a nightmare.
NIGHTMARE
The year was 1982 and I was struggling with a new novel to follow The Keep. Not a sequel; an unrelated supernatural horror novel. But it wasn’t working. All the parts were there but they didn’t gel. My fellow writers will understand the situation. It’s like being Frankenstein in the James Whale film: You’ve assembled all the parts but where’s the lightning? Day after day the damn skies remain clear, denying you that life-giving electric jolt.
Around this time I had a dream in which I was being chased across a rooftop by some nameless creature. The damn thing wanted to tear me up; nothing I did to defend myself or defeat it worked. Sort of like my work in progress.
Obviously a frustration dream. I awoke feeling emotionally and physically drained and knew I couldn’t let that scene go. I had to use it somewhere. It had no place in the current project, so I’d have to come up with a new story. I decided to put the stalled book aside—not a wrenching decision since it wasn’t going anywhere anyway—and make a fresh start on something new. (I came back to it a half dozen years or so later, saw what it needed, and rewrote is as Reborn.)
The big challenge of the new book was not so much coming up with a story to incorporate that rooftop scene—story has never been a problem for me—but finding a character who could survive the encounter, someone better equipped than yours truly. To quote Bonnie Tyler …
I NEED A HERO
With a baker’s dozen films making James Bond a household name, and black ops agents like Robert Ludlum’s Jason Bourne dominating the bestseller charts, I could have simply modeled my hero on them and joined the party. But I knew that wasn’t going to work for me. I’d had great success following the road less traveled in the horror genre by turning the international thriller on its head and delivering The Keep. Why not do the same here?
But what to change? To decide that, I took inventory of the elements all the Bonds and the Bournes had in common. One thing struck me immediately: They all work for their governments. New World apparatchiks, as it were, with licenses to kill. Government employees in the clandestine services with covert training, following orders to go out and kill similar employees of other governments.
I definitely did not want to write about someone like that.
So … first off, no government connection. Jack is not a government agent. This was a must. I wanted him to be an independent contractor, answering to no one. The downside is he can’t call on an old CIA buddy or former partner in the police force to run some prints through VICAP or check out a license plate for him. He’s got to create his own network.
Second, no formal martial training. He’s not an ex-Navy SEAL or a Ranger or a Marine sniper or CIA black ops specialist. What skills he has he’s picked up on his own, either on the street or in local dojos.
Third, off the grid. When I decided against a government connection, I took it a step further and decided no government should know he even exists. It made sense. At no time during his life has Jack ever been registered as an official employee of a company. In his teens he mowed lawns and worked part time off the books as an underage helper at Mr. Rosen’s store in town. As an adult he worked as a landscaper or a waiter or a bus boy, always off the books. So he’s never needed a Social Security Number and has no intention of ever registering for one. Thus, he’s never paid income taxes and never will.
That’s not to say he pays no taxes, of course. Modern life is filled with everyday taxes, some obvious, like sales tax, and others hidden like taxes built into the prices of gasoline and liquor and all imports, plus those tacked on to the end of utility and phone bills and airline tickets and so on. Taxes are a part of what you pay for pretty much everything. So, yeah, Jack pays plenty of taxes.
He’s what I call a “gut anarchist.” He’s never read Spooner or Rothbard, but has a visceral avoidance reaction to anything that will compromise his autonomy. You’ve most likely heard of the Three Chinese Curses (which, by the way, no one can prove originated in China) but, if not, here they are:
May you live in interesting times.
May you come to the attention of those in authority.
May you find what you are looking for.
Jack’s biggest fear is the second curse, because he knows the powers that be will not look kindly on his lifestyle, accusing him of being, at the very least, a tax rebel, and from there anywhere up to a domestic terrorist. His precious autonomy will be gone forever.
Finally, he’s a fixer. A repairman. Not appliances … situations. He’s an urban mercenary. When the system can’t fix your problem—or when the system is your problem—you go to someone who operates outside the system. Someone like Jack, who solves problems for cash.
Oh, and then there’s the matter of the surname. Here’s a typical exchange from many of the novels:
“And that leaves us with you, Mister…?”
“Jack.”
“Jack what?”
“Just Jack.”
We never know Jack’s true surname. He uses a number of them, but never his own. And don’t ask me. The truth is, I’ve never given him one, so even I don’t know it.
Okay, I had my protagonist. Well, his skeleton, anyway. I hadn’t figured the nuances of his character, his personality and such, so I would need to put flesh on those bones. But I never go into a story knowing all of a player’s personal nuances. If I’ve nailed down all their traits before I start, then the characters start dictating how they’re going to act in the story. Uh-uh. I consider myself a storyteller, and so the story comes first. I’m in charge. I’m with Nabokov on this when he says his characters are “galley slaves.” I tell them what to do. If their traits are fixed at the outset, I’m sure to run into any number of He-wouldn’t-do-that situations. That’s why I let the character develop as the story progresses. By the end of the first draft I know him pretty well, so then I go back and make sure he’s consistent at the beginning with the guy he became by the end.
The guy I ended up with is pretty much the guy you know from the novels and stories. But the Jack you know is a product of the early eighties. Things have changed since then.
I was in NYC recently for the annual International Thriller Writers conference. I hadn’t visited the city in years due to all the shutdowns and lockouts and COVID-related restrictions. It struck me as I stood on a corner and watched the locals stream by how the city’s complexion—literally and figuratively—has changed. I designed Jack as a guy who has embraced ordinariness so that he can slip through the streets unnoticed. That was back in 1982. I found it hard to imagine him pulling that off now. I suppose it could be done, but I realized that if I was designing Jack these days, I’d probably add some pigment to his skin.
Jack is who he is, but I’m thinking today’s ghost in the machine is a man of color.
THE CONSTANTS
Gia DiLauro and her daughter, Vicky—In so many thriller series, a new novel means a new gal pal. Not Jack. He’s had his share of relationships through the years, but once he met Gia, he became a one-woman man. Gia left him for a while when he was less than honest with her as to how he made his living, but now that they’re back together, Gia is the only woman in his life.
Julio—A Newyorican and probably the closest Jack has to a best friend. He met Julio shortly after he arrived in New York, helped him and his sister out of a few jams, and they’ve been buds ever since. Julio runs an Upper West Side dive bar—one of the last of a dying breed—named, appropriately enough, “Julio’s,” which Jack uses as an office of sorts. Julio is noted for his awful colognes and his bar is notable for the dead plants hanging in the front windows.
Abe Grossman—It might be a tossup between Abe and Julio as to who is Jack’s best friend, but Abe functions more as an uncle and a sounding board. They first met when Jack was fourteen and working in Mr. Rosen’s store in his home town. Abe came in and tried to coax him into cheating his boss but Jack would have none of it. Good thing, too, because this fast-talking customer was Mr. Rosen’s nephew. He gave Jack his business card—for the Isher Sports Shop—and said if he was ever in Manhattan and needed anything to look him up. Seven years later Jack did just that. He soon learned that Abe’s real business wasn’t the sporting goods upstairs, but the weapons shop in the basement. Abe’s speech is peppered with Yiddishkeit and rarely has he met a food he didn’t like.
ACCESSORIZING
For his main carry I wanted a compact 9mm semiauto. A Glock 19 fit the bill very nicely. But for his backup I couldn’t resist a Semmerling skeleton model LM-4, the world’s smallest .45. I saw o
ne for sale in Shotgun News as I was developing the character and fell in love. I—I mean Jack—had to have it. It’s a sweet little piece with a four-round magazine affording you five blasts of devastating stopping power if you keep a fifth round chambered. The odd thing about it is that it looks like an autoloader but is not. Not only must the slide be manually racked to chamber a new round, but racked forward.
But he didn’t have the Semmerling for too long. I realized that a guy who wants to be invisible can’t have a signature weapon like the LM-4. So I had someone connect it with him in Hosts and that forced him to retire it. An unexpected fallout from his five-novel association with the weapon is that almost every article I read on the Semmerling nowadays mentions Jack somewhere along the way.
Shortly before he became Repairman Jack he bought a black-on-white 1963 Corvair convertible—a sweet ride no matter what Ralph Nader said. But the Corvair had the same problem as the Semmerling: too recognizable. So he had to get rid of that as well.
Damn. Jack loved that car. Being invisible definitely has its drawbacks.
GOING DIGITAL
With these pieces in place, I started writing the novel—on my brand new personal computer. All during the seventies I was a sci-fi guy (three novels, a novella, and a clutch of short stories). I wanted to write horror but no market existed until King started hitting the bestseller lists. My time had come. Everyone was doing small-town horror á la Carrie and ’Salem’s Lot. I decided to go widescreen and mix horror with a Ludlumesque thriller. No one else was writing anything like that, so my agent had no problem selling it. In fact, he snagged a film option before we had a publishing deal.
While all these negotiations were going on, I attended the 1980 World Science Fiction Convention in Boston. During a conversation with Joe Haldeman he mentioned he was writing his latest novel on a computer using software called a “word processor” that allowed him to erase simply by backspacing and to rearrange paragraphs hither and thither at will. Whoa! As a two-finger typist back then (and still), the idea of not having to retype the entire manuscript for a second or third draft seemed too good to be true. The following spring I invested in an Apple II+ along with the (very primitive) Applewriter 1.0 program and an Epson dot matrix printer. I was wired, baby.
SEARCHING FOR A BEASTIE
I concentrated on Jack’s quotidian routine during the opening chapters while I hunted for a suitable thing to chase him around that rooftop. I wanted to avoid the Lovecraft mythos and Christian mythology, preferring some sort of fabled creature but one not too familiar. Initially I saw possibilities in a djinn (twisted into “genie” by the French) if I avoided the lamp-dwelling, three-wish archetype and found a dark side I could exploit. The first working title therefore became Djinni. But when I couldn’t find any djinn lore I wanted to use, I switched to India. The huge Hindu pantheon had to have something I could use, but the local libraries offered slim pickings.
Remember, we’re talking early eighties here. No Google or DuckDuckGo available to search the world’s knowledge bases, only printed encyclopedias and card files. I lost a lot of time with the Dewey Decimal System, searching through books about India and its folklore, until I came upon a juvenile called The Demons of Rajpur by Molly and Betsy Bang. It retold tales from Bengali folklore about a demonic creature known as a “rakosh,” a fierce beastie who devoured human flesh.
Yes!
But it was also a shape shifter, which I ignored because it would cause too many narrative problems. The Bang sisters used “rakoshes” as their plural. This sounded clunky to me so I made the plural “rakoshi.” I later learned that the Bangs had used an obscure spelling for the demons who are otherwise known throughout India as rakshasa. My title now became Rakoshi! (I eventually dropped that exclamation point).
I had my beastie, now all I needed was a human adversary. The presence of the rakoshi dictated that he be Hindu and so I came up with Kusum Bahkti, one of my favorite villains. Jack and Kusum are flip sides of the same coin—both honorable men with strict codes of ethics and conduct, but with purposes running counter to each other. Under different circumstances they might have been friends.
REJECTED
Okay: the lines were drawn, the sides chosen. Now to write the book. Which I did. I was practicing medicine full time then but adopted the approach I’d used with The Keep: I wrote at least three pages a day, every day, week after week, month after month. Eventually I wound of with a manuscript nearly 140 thousand words in length, much longer than I’d intended.
By the end I knew I had a hot series character, someone who could carry a string of novels. But I didn’t want to do a series—actually, another series, since all my SF in the seventies was part of my LaNague Federation future history. My goal now was to write the next novel, no matter what it was. I had The Touch already written in my head, and Black Wind was starting to niggle my neurons. Would those books ever see print if I committed to a Repairman Jack series? I saw it taking over my career and I wasn’t ready for that. My solution: Leave Jack helpless and bleeding at the end. Would Gia or Abe show up in time to save him? Or would he slowly bleed to death? I left that up to the reader.
For the work presently at hand, the word processor speeded the editing and rewriting process and before too long I was able to hand a fat dot-matrix manuscript to my agent. He wasn’t crazy about it as a follow-up to an international bestseller, but sent it off to Pat Golbitz who’d edited The Keep at Wm. Morrow. She promptly rejected it, calling it “bloated and overwritten,” but remaining vague as to any other reasons.
That was a kick in the head. I mean, I didn’t get it. Overwriting can be edited. Was something else going on? Was it Jack’s anarchic, seditious, subversive, under-the-radar lifestyle? I’ll never know.
Apropos to this, years later when I switched publishers in the 1990s, the ancient five-and-a-quarter-inch disks I’d used to store the Rakoshi ms. in 1983 were corrupted, so Tor scanned the book and let me revise it. Upon a close reread I had to admit Pat had a point. Not so much bloated, but certainly overwritten. As I began textual surgery, I found loads of passive voice and embarrassing pleonasms: People crouching down, smoke rising up, the dying mother rakosh falling to her death “trailing smoke and flame behind her.” (Nice trick if she could trail them ahead of her.)
I had to revamp Times Square because it had been Disneyfied since the early eighties. The good news was that I didn’t have to change the characters. At all. They held up just fine. The problem was all the excess verbiage I forced them (and the reader) to wade though.
If nothing else, the revision process showed me that I’d become a better writer over the years. And I’m still learning.
GOODBYE, RAKOSHI
Back to 1983: My agent wanted me to stick the ms. in a drawer and start something more in line with The Keep. Uh-uh. I’d grown to like Jack and wasn’t giving up on him. So the book went to Berkley, the folks who’d made The Keep a paperback bestseller. They planned to do the same for Rakoshi. But Berkley had a problem with the title. After going through the editing, the copyediting, the page proofs, I got a call from the publisher herself, Rena Wolner.
She came right to the point and said we had to change the title. Rakoshi was too foreign a word and would put people off.
I reminded her that Trevanian’s Shibumi was currently near the top of the bestseller lists. She reminded me that I wasn’t Trevanian. Too true.
Berkley wanted a cover and a title that would echo The Keep: They would use the temple from the book’s historical flashback for the image, but for the title they needed The … Something. The sales department liked The Tomb.
I reminded her—rather vigorously, as I recall—that the book contained no tomb. So, no way. Absolutely not. People will feel cheated and angry.
She said people won’t care as long as they like the book. And besides, the sales department figured they could ship an extra quarter-million or so copies if the title was The Tomb instead of Rakoshi.
Whoa. A quick mental calculation of my share of the cover price times 250,000 …
Okay … I caved. Sue me. Part of it was selling out, I suppose. But intimidation had a lot to do with it. I was vulnerable after being rejected by Wm. Morrow, and here I was getting a hard sell on the title from the publisher herself. The Tomb it was.
